Choosing the right keywords

In most cases our site is surrounding one main issue, if it's weight loss, games, news, flowers or even cabinets, to let Google know how to find our site we need to put a META TAG – KEYWORDS in our site code so people who type "cabinets" will get to our website.
But in most cases the very first phrase that come up to our mind is the first phrase that comes up to most of our competitors, that's why most of the main phrases will hard to compete to get to #1 on Google because I presume we not the only one who's trying to make some internet marketing techniques.
So what can we do to get to our future customers without working hours and hours to get the main phrase, what we need to do is to focus on other keywords that relate to our main issue without the main keywords, I'll explain;
If we got a site about custom cabinets, the first thing we got in mind is to promote the word "cabinets" but, obviously we not the first and probably not the last who wants to promote that word, we need to get a little less common the just "cabinets" and that's why, first, that word not necessarily will bring us new customers because not all of the people who just typed cabinets lives in your city or even your country and could be just looking for some INFO about cabinets it self, so what we need to do is focus to get new customers and not new viewers, let's try to focus our SEO steps for "long tail" phrases like "cabinets Las Vegas", basically we are focusing on our future customers and not just to get #1 rank on Google.
Now, few facts before we go on, the word "cabinets" is searched in Google on March 2009 5.000.000 times, I know it is allot of new possible viewers but it cannot be new customers when you only have a business website and not some news website and you are working locally, now, the phrase "Las Vegas cabinets" search on March 2000 times, what makes us think more clearly, because:
1. This is our future customers
2. Because it’s a "long tail" phrase it will be easier to promote with our internet marketing techniques
3. Less competitors, less un-local business, less "just looking for some info about cabinets" viewers and more future customers.

Don’t let the big numbers on the search results fool you, if you will be #1 on a word like "cabinets" is just will have to make you work hours and hours (which probably you don’t have consider your actually day job) to promote your site and all this for traffic to your website instead of future customers.

* If you have a website that work on future viewers we will teach later on how to bring traffic to your website without working extra hours on SEO.